WhatAboutTeams

What does it really mean to be a team? There are so many books out there about how to be a team, build a team, measure a team. What exactly does it mean to you? What characteristics would a group have to have for you to call them a team? MarieBenesh 2002.07.23

They have to wear uniforms? (Did I get it right?)

The have generally to do something that no one of them could do as well alone, at least some of the time.

-JerryWeinberg 2002.07.23

So, any two people working in concert to get something done is a team? For example, two people lifting a couch to take it across the room. If they both don't lift at the same time, it won't happen. If they both stand at the same end of the couch, that won't work. If one lifts, and one doesn't, that won't work. Something happens, though, between those two people so that, at least for the moment of lifting and carrying, they work in tandem, as a team, each doing what they are supposed to do. This is a simplistic example, but I think it illustrates a problem that teams (or groups that think they are a team) have: Not everyone knows what to do, what their role is, and so sometimes they all stand at one end of the couch. MarieBenesh 2002.07.24

What characteristics would a group have to have for you to call them a team?

Respect for one another.

-BeckyWinant 2002.07.24

A team is a whole lot different than a group.

Groups underutilize the skills of its members. A possible root cause is that groups are created by a single individual to further that person's objectives rather than the shared objectives of the group. I've noticed over and over that group gatherings waste my time. The return on time invested in group interaction tends to favor the individual who created the group. If there is a return for the group, it's an accident.

On the other hand, a true team utilizes the skills of its members to further each other�s mutual objectives. Time invested with a team returns a dividend to both the individual and the team. I come away from team interaction feeling better and more purposeful.

To Becky's point, I respect people that help me further my objectives while simultaneously allowing me to help them further their own objectives. This action is double reinforcing for me because an objective of mine is to help others.

SteveSmith 2002.07.24

So the question seems to be how to go from being a group to being a team. Often managers 'tell' a group that they are a team now. Uh huh. Then they do some ropes class or a team-building program that never cuts to the real issues of what I want, what you want, what we want as a team, our goals and objectives, how we interact, etc. So, how did your teams become teams? MarieBenesh 2002.07.26

A lot of groups are told they are "teams" because management has a goal, a project of some sort that they want done. So we may have a common goal, in theory, but many of us won't even know what we want personally. Lots of people just want to be working, so that they are busy. If they aren't busy, they might think - that way lies madness. The people have not usually worked together before. Most of the time, any "team building" activities come later, after the work is done.

So how did we become teams? Often, we never did feel like a team to me. Sometimes, we became teams because we liked each other, had common interests and that's how we work best; these teams were often not the ones management intended. But the really strongly bonded teams that I have worked on all worked on a "project from hell" together. Those bonds hold over time and distance, sometimes making it difficult to bond with the next team.

SherryHeinze 2002.7.26

Sherry--I think it was Jerry who once told me something about how we can work on a really great team and spend the rest of our days trying to recreate that with others, often never acheiving that. Sounds melancholy, doesn't it? <grin>. I think you hit something important: liking each other, and projects from hell. In either case, perhaps support is the common factor there. If we could learn how to do that without the project from hell and maybe even while we are getting to know each other, wouldn't that be something? MarieBenesh 2002.07.26

I had an experience with a group that really bonded when I worked for a corporation. It was an R&D group within a large IT organization. We scanned for cool new technology and did experimental and pilot projects to apply those technologies to business problems. We had the first Newtons, and worked with neural nets, AI and data mining. (Woohoo. It was a long time ago.)

Our bond was for support and survivial. THe director of the group believed that screaming threats and abuse were appropriate and effective management actions. One person or another came out of Ms. Lagree's (a pseudonym, of course) office in tears every week. We banded around each other for comfort, support and of course, to bemoan the management practices of Ms. Lagree.

We had all been threated in one way or another that she would control whether we were able to find other jobs in the organization. And who wanted to go back to working with COBOL and CICS?

We had a common goal: survivial in an abusive situation where we were pulled to stay by the content of the work and pushed to stay by the threats of retribution and ruined careers. I don't think any of us would have survived without the support of team-mates.

Looking back on it the image I get is of a bunch of frightened kids being terrorized by an alcoholic parent. But maybe we would have left the R&D group and gone onto a more functional organization sooner, if we hadn't been so tightly bonded to each other. It's hard to know.

Eventaully, most of us did go work with more mudane technologies and more humane managers. But we stayed in touch individually and we continued to meet for lunch once a month for two years. On some level, the topics continued to be the same, gripping and validation in an organization that was being subsumed into a parent company with a completely different culture ( think small mid-west vs large New York).

The connections weakened when some of us left the company: the bond of whining and dining was not very satisfying.

EstherDerby 072702

I was a member of 2 bonded teams while at Aetna. One was the project team for the first billing system to use a commercial database product online, the other was a DBA team that transcended projects.

I think what made both of these teams gell was that the nature of the project or role was too big for one person to contemplate doing (or even understanding fully) solo. The only path to success was team interdependence.

The billing system had enough new technologies together with enough business analysis to challenge the capacity of any to hold it all in his/her head. We experimented (successfully) in the structured technologies, and employed walk-throughs extensively. I think that walk-thrus forced us to socialize and recognize different strengths in different people. We also had team humor and team picnics to blow off stresses of a 2-3 year 25-person project.

The DBA organization had it's success articulated by my boss as:

"Nobody ever calls the telephone company to say, 'Wow, I really love your service and uptime.' Don't look for complements for a service that should be invisible at its best."

So, instead of needing outside approval, we recognized and appreciated ourselves. We participated in expert review and architecture committees of up to 15 concurrent projects, we managed and served as change control board for backup / recovery procedures for each production system using databases. Our understanding of data thruput issues placed us on many conversion projects that had critical or tight conversion windows. We had to know and trust each other to succeed, so we did. Again, humor and picnics helped break down stress before it broke us down.

--BobLee 2002.07.27

So, it seems we've got a couple of different team 'bonding' reasons:

Survival: it works by necessity, but it is certainly not fun.

Common interests: personal relationshps, shared goals, desire for performance improvement, ability to work on cool new stuff and willing to go the extra mile to be able to do it. MarieBenesh 2002.07.27

In my experience, bonding against a common enemy (your boss) is not a very sound foundation for team formation. It might get you started, but it's a distraction from real purposes. Transform it quickly.

Another way to tell if you're a team is if you get at team discount at the AYE Conference. - JerryWeinberg 2002.07.27

Yes, bonding against a common enemy -- the devil boss-- was not a sound foundation. And that "team bond" didn't help us focus on getting the work of the department done.

So who transforms a common enemy type bond? And how would the transformer go about shifting towards a more productive bond?

EstherDerby 072802

"Yet another way to tell if you're a team..." is if the Franklin Mint issues a seasonal Santa Claus dressed like your team complete with a bagful of playful insignia toys! - NOT!

--BobLee 2002.07.28

Updated: Sunday, July 28, 2002